Angel Hunt (10 page)

I knew a self-employed barman by the name of Kenny who, the Christmas before, had thought up the wicked scheme of telling the chestnut-roasters that they had to be licensed street vendors. He even ran up some fake City of Westminster chestnut licences, and it would have been a laugh, but he tried to charge for them. They'd ganged up on Kenny, and afterwards he looked as if the mean streets had come up to meet him face first. Never mess with anybody who really does know how to roast nuts.

Martin had almost certainly made the rendezvous first, because he was keen. And because he was a good trombonist, I was quite happy to rescue him from Chase, Bunny's tuba playing friend. Let's face it, I'd rescue Martin Bormann from Chase, the one man I know whose conversation makes Mogadon an upper.

‘Wotcha, Marty. Hello, Chase,' I said, spreading the smile thinner as I went. I'm not a racist, but (have you noticed, there's always a ‘but'?) I hate tuba-players. ‘Any sign of a truck?'

‘Not yet,' said Martin, all eager, ‘but we're early.'

I looked at my watch: one minute to 11.00. All over London, the bolts on pub doors were tensing themselves for their daily bid for freedom.

We were roughly in the middle of St Christopher's Place, which isn't a ‘place' in the French sense, just an alley that cuts between Oxford and Wigmore Streets. It has a fair cross-section of shops selling fashion, books, military models and bathroom smellies. There were also places to eat if you fancied (a) a very expensive hamburger, (b) authentic Austrian cuisine, if you didn't mind the creaking of lederhosen as you ate, or (c) high quality Japanese food, some of it dead before it got to the table, if you had all day.

Because we were standing outside the Japanese restaurant, I told Chase to go in and order some takeaways for about two o'clock, while Martin and I would scout either end of the Place for Bunny's truck. He looked suspicious at first, and so did the Japanese waiters as they helped him pull his tuba case through the very narrow doorway. By the time he'd got inside, I'd taken Martin's arm and we were down the alley outside the Pontefract Castle just as the doors opened.

‘Bit early isn't it?' asked Martin, reaching for his wallet.

‘Iron rations,' I said, tapping my nose.

I ordered two coffees with rum at the bar – Watson's Trawlerman's rum is the best, if you can get it, as drunk by Scottish fishermen – and while that was coming, I emptied the pockets of my parka. Now unless you're a skinhead of the old school, or have been time-warped for 20 years, parkas are not exactly in when it comes to neat threads. If, however, you need deep pockets, a fleece lining and a hood, because you know you could freeze your butt off on the back of a truck, they're the business. If the parka also has USS Ticonderoga printed across the left breast and you won it in a backgammon game on San Francisco's Pier 39, then you have enough kudos to carry it off.

I pulled out some money and laid it on the bar, followed by a pair of black leather driving gloves with the tops of the three middle fingers cut off the right hand, a tube of mint-flavoured lip salve and a metal hip-flask engraved with the words: ‘I am not a diabetic; in case of accidents, please rush me to the nearest public house.' Gross, I know, but it came in handy.

‘Can I have four brandies and two shots of ginger wine to put in here, please?' I asked the barman, who didn't bat an eyelid.

Martin peered over the top of his coffee.

‘What do you call that?'

‘What?'

‘Brandy and Stone's ginger.'

‘It's a Brandy Mac, the best thing for keeping out the cold. And it's gonna get chilly out there.'

‘I hadn't thought of that,' he said, looking down at his sports jacket, shirt and tie. (He wasn't senior enough at the BBC to wear a suit.)

‘You'll need some of this too,' I said, holding up the lip salve. ‘There's a chemist's round the corner.'

‘Good idea,' he nodded.

In the days before Aids, I'd have thought nothing of offering it to him, but nowadays you didn't even have to mention it. I suppose it's the same for people who used to pass joints around at parties.

I'd just finished filling the hip flask when it went dark in the bar as a truck pulled up at the traffic lights outside. I turned to look through the windows. It was a flat-backed Bedford, a homemade job by the look of it, with bits of a drum kit and an ancient upright piano waving around dangerously. I saw Chase hump his tuba case over the tailboard and climb in after it, just as Dod climbed out.

The lights changed and the truck pulled off with Chase trying to keep his balance and looking thoroughly bemused. The pub door opened and Dod stalked in.

‘Pint of Bass, please,' I ordered, so that it was half-pulled before he got to the bar.

“Mornin', Angel,' he said gruffly, and nodded down at Martin. ‘Anybody else here?'

‘Just Chase,' I said. ‘You passed him on the way in.'

Dod reached out a ham of a hand for his beer.

‘He was rabbit-rabbit about a Chinese restaurant or sumfink. Said they didn't do takeaway. What's he on about?'

He got the glass to his lips and conversation ceased for about 8.3 seconds.

‘Can't think, Dod. What's the traffic like?'

‘Bumper to arse all round the block. The truck won't be back for ages.'

‘Time for another, then?' asked Martin.

He was catching on.

 

It was after noon by the time we actually got sorted, much to the annoyance of the lady from the public relations company who had hired us.

There was a delay while the truck-driver – a guy called Ali who was almost as big as Dod and who had a library edition of
The Satanic Verses
on his dashboard – strung banners down the side of the truck saying: ‘All your presents in one Place – St Christopher's.' Then we had to tie Trippy to the piano. We had to do this because some chucklehead had provided him with a typist's chair on castors, and every time the truck turned left he did a circuit of the flat-back, sending everybody else flying. He thought it a gas, but we secured his chair by a double strand of rope running right round the piano. Fortunately, Dod and Chase had been provided with camping stools, and although Dod's creaked a bit under his weight, it did mean they stayed roughly in the same place.

I took up my position near Dod, as it was preferable to having my ear down the muzzle of Chase's tuba, and Martin was told to hang over the back of the truck as best he could. (Ever wondered where the expression ‘tailgate trombone' came from?)

Bunny, with his clarinet, had a sort of roving commission, which in his case meant roving among the three promo girls dressed in red mini skirts, fake fur jackets and hoods, black fishnet tights and white boots, who would be dishing out leaflets advertising the shops.

It was quite a crush, but the first circuit – left on to Orchard Street and all the way round Selfridges, then Oxford Street as far as Marylebone Lane and then Wigmore again – went off without serious injury. Then we stopped as one of the Santa Claus girls had to go to the loo, and anyway we'd forgotten the leaflets they were supposed to dish out.

One of the Santas turned out to be Kim on a moonlight from Simon's Boozebuster operation, but I promised not to tell. We were getting on famously by half-way round the second circuit, and Dod was digging into a case of canned lager he'd hidden under his stool, then Martin said wouldn't it be a good idea if we actually played something.

We looked at him, then at each other, and finally I got out the lip salve and said ‘Okay, it's showtime!' and Kim said: ‘Whatever do you mean?'

The day went downhill after that.

 

In a ramshackle sort of way, we actually put together a few decent tunes, though as is always the case with truck bands, or marching bands for that matter, quality loses out to volume. We did the Christmassy stuff and the old New Orleans favourites and, with Trippy playing the top of the truck cab with a pair of spare drum sticks, I got them organised into a version of Masekela's ‘Don't Go Lose It',
which lasted one and a half circuits. Then the PR lady appeared and told us we should be playing more sing-along.

Dod was half way through his case of lager, Kim had severely damaged my hip flask and Ali knew the route so well he was now reading
The Satanic Verses
while driving. I hoped that by knocking-off time I'd be able to say that I knew someone who had finished it. (Rule of Life No 7: no day is wasted.) We decided to grab some lunch on the hoof.

This involved a detour round to the McDonald's on Baker Street before the PR lady missed us. It also involved us in playing ‘When the Saints' (which we'd resisted up to then) for the two policemen who caught us parked on a double yellow line. They let us off after our three Santa Clausesses mobbed them and asked to play with the red furry pandas they had clipped to the aerials of their radios, on condition we played ‘Saints' until out of sight.

We were further delayed getting back on station by a detour for me to the south end of Duke Street. While the rest of the gang dived into the pub opposite to use the toilets, I called in at H R Higgins (Coffee-man) Ltd and bought six gift boxes of coffee (assorted) and two of tea (scented). That was my Christmas shopping sewn up. Who said it was stressful?

The PR lady had disappeared by the time we reached the Wigmore Street entrance to St Christopher's Place, which was probably just as well. Kim, well fortified with Brandy Mac, was feeding cold Big Mac to Trippy while straddling his lap, his arms around her waist so he could still play. One of the other girls was sitting splay-legged, using Dod's drums as windshield, trying to roll a joint using one of the advertising leaflets as a roach. Bunny was chatting up the other girl, Chase was still going oompah-oompah and Martin was desperately starting his ninth solo on ‘Tiger Rag'
.

I tapped Martin on the shoulder and signalled a cut by drawing a finger across my throat.

‘C'mon, guys and gals, this is falling apart.'

‘I agree,' said Dod, popping the ring pull on another can of lager.

‘We've another 20 minutes to do,' said Bunny, untangling his identity bracelet from Santa Claus's fishnets. ‘Or we don't get paid.'

Trippy hit a couple of bass chords, classic threatening music, and shouted: ‘The crew be turning ugly, Cap'n.'

I suspected that Kim sitting on his lap like that had perked him up no end.

‘Okay, troops,' I said. Why did it always have to be the trumpet-player? ‘Three more times round the block doing the seasonal cheer bit, playing it dead straight. Then off to the pub to get rat-arsed.'

‘Seems reasonable,' said Dod, like he'd seen Richard Widmark say it in a film once, really chill.

Martin and Chase nodded, Bunny buried his head into Santa's neck and Trippy yelled, ‘A wise decision, Cap'n Smollett,' and struck up ‘Jingle Bells'
with us all joining in at some point or another.

On that circuit, I was vaguely conscious that there were more blue uniforms on the streets than normal, but then that was normal in the West End for the pre-Christmas rush. Not that it was any sort of crackdown on muggers or pickpockets, but in the week before the Season of Goodwill, the Marks and Spencer store on Orchard Street gets more bomb threats than the average American Embassy east of Cyprus. Parked somewhere nearby would be a couple of police vans with sniffer dogs, and cordoning off parts of the street had become so commonplace that the cops had left reels of white tape and tripods at strategic points just in case.

It was as we started our second run and we were at the lights at the corner of Portman Square, that I saw the cops had concentrated themselves on the traffic island in Baker Street.

As I just knew that everybody on the truck had a clear conscience, they couldn't possibly be interested in us, could they? Just in case, I bent down and told the joint-smoking Santa to get rid of it. She did so by lifting one of Chase's Doc Marten's (the other was keeping time) and pushing the joint under it. Chase looked horrified, but had to keep playing as he was backing Trippy's solo on ‘So This Is Christmas'
(which at one point, I'll swear, had drifted into ‘Wabash Cannonball' – you had to be there).

Martin and I came back in together for a verse to give Bunny a lead in on his clarinet for three or four choruses, and he was good, but probably barely audible above the traffic. As I relaxed, I took a look around to see what was going down, just as we pulled away from the lights and turned left.

It sounds crazy to say I hadn't noticed it before, as we must have driven by ten or a dozen times, but you really don't notice that much when you're trying to keep your balance and play at the same time.

A fair crowd had gathered on the Wigmore Street-Portman Square corner, and at first you could have mistaken it for a queue outside a sandwich shop, or even the post office just a bit further down the street. (People going there to post Christmas cards had been advised to take sleeping-bags.) But this crowd were not queuing for anything.